Archive for January, 2006

se fue otro papi-pionero…(& regret me quede mudo re.: wicked pickett’s passing…reminded me i need to restart shaking my ass ev’ry once in a while before i atrophy…) Over the next few years, Mr. Paik arrived at an early version of performance art, combining cryptic musical elements  usually spliced audiotapes of music, screams, radio news and sound effects  with startling events. In an unusually Oedipal act during a 1960 performance in Cologne, Mr. Paik jumped from the stage and cut off Cage’s necktie, an event that prompted George Maciunas, a founder of Fluxus, to invite Mr. Paik to join the movement. At the 1962 Fluxus International Festival for Very New Music in Wiesbaden, Germany, Mr. Paik performed “Zen for Head,” which involved dipping his head, hair and hands in a mixture of ink and tomato juice and dragging them over a scroll-like sheet of paper to create a dark, jagged streak.

ARTS / ART & DESIGN | January 31, 2006 Nam June Paik, 73, Dies; Pioneer of Video Art Whose Work Broke Cultural Barriers By ROBERTA SMITH Nam June Paik was an avant-garde composer, performer and artist who was widely considered the inventor of video art.

wanderlust media
grounding the virtual realm, retracing age-old footpaths to rest at home in the motion of desire.

What’s your biggest regret over 40 years of political activism? What would you have done differently?

I would have done more. Because the problems are so serious and overwhelming that it’s disgraceful not to do more about it.

What gives you hope?

What gives me hope actually is public opinion. Public opinion in the United States is very well studied, we know a lot about it. It’s rarely reported, but we know about it. And it turns out that, you know, I’m pretty much in the mainstream of public opinion on most issues. I’m not on some, not on gun control or creationism or something like that, but on most crucial issues, the ones we’ve been talking about, I find myself pretty much at the critical end, but within the spectrum of public opinion. I think that’s a very hopeful sign. I think the United States ought to be an organizer’s paradise.

What sort of organizing should be done to try and change some of these policies?

Well, there’s a basis for democratic change. Take what happened in Bolivia a couple of days ago. How did a leftist indigenous leader get elected? Was it showing up at the polls once every four years and saying, “Vote for me!”? No. It’s because there are mass popular organizations which are working all the time on everything from blocking privatization of water to resources to local issues and so on, and they’re actually participatory organizations. Well, that’s democracy. We’re a long way from it. And that’s one task of organizing.

wanderlust media
grounding the virtual realm, retracing age-old footpaths to rest at home in the motion of desire.